In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  Both stories were accepted promptly. "The Wedge" was taken on April n, 1944, for $122.50, and "Dead Hand" on August 26, 1944, for $437.50 (a new high in payment for a single story).

  3

  We weren't bothered much by wartime shortages, thanks to our unsophisticated way of life. Rubber and gasoline rationing didn't affect us since we didn't own an automobile. Bernie Zitin organized a car pool so he could qualify for more gasoline and use the excess for his own purposes, and I benefited by that. In the end, though, I switched to rapid transit. Zitin's comings and goings were too erratic to suit my orderly self.

  It was also difficult to get alcohol, and we were issued liquor rationing stamps. Neither Gertrude nor I drank so we had no use for them at all, and this sometimes brought us a dubious popularity when we were courted for the sake of those unused stamps.

  There was food rationing, of course, and shoe rationing, and we couldn't avoid that. Such matters were inconvenient—but never to the point of hardship.

  Sometimes there would be rumors of particular shortages. Suddenly it would become hard to get soap because everyone talked of a soap shortage and hoarding would set in. Well, lack of soap was unthinkable now that I had learned to love showers, and we did our share of hoarding.

  In the winter of 1944-45, there was a sudden and temporary shortage of cigarettes, and that would have pleased me if both of us didn't smoke, for the panic and fright of all the addicts would have been a

  source of sardonic amusement for me. Unfortunately, Gertrude smoked, and she and I would stand on separate lines to accumulate cartons.

  The war seriously affected the candy-store business. It put everyone to work and nobody would run a candy store if there were any other way of making a living. Store after store closed down, therefore, and never reopened. Those that stayed open, such as my parents', became less dependent on their customers. They could close at times, for instance.

  On February 22, 1944, for instance, my parents seized the fact of a legal holiday to close the store and come to Philadelphia to visit us for a day. They brought Stanley with them; he was now 14V2 years old and was going to Brooklyn Technical High School. All went very well and Gertrude prepared an excellent dinner for them.

  4

  In the spring of 1944, Sprague lent me his six-volume Study of History by Arnold Toynbee (one volume at a time). After the war, Toyn-bee went through a period of great, though temporary, popularity. Sprague, however, was an admirer long before the rest of the world caught on. I came to be an admirer, too—temporarily.

  There are some people who, on reading my Foundation series, are sure that it was influenced basically by Toynbee. They are only partly right. The first four stories were written before I had read Toynbee. "Dead Hand," however, was indeed influenced by it.

  Afterward, however, as I continued to read Toynbee, my admiration waned. More and more, it was obvious to me that he was essentially a classical and Christian scholar and that the order he found in history was an imposed one produced by his seeing reflections of classical history wherever he looked. The final stories of the Foundation series were once more relatively free of his influence, therefore.

  What really influenced the Foundation series was, as I said before, Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I had read and admired as a seventeen-year-old and which I never ceased to admire.

  Another influence was The Historian's History of the World, a 1907-vintage twenty-four-volume collection of historical writings so arranged as to give a chronological account of events, nation by nation. It made for jumpy reading, but I loved it, and during the latter half of 1943, I picked it out, volume by volume, from the Philadelphia Free Library, reading it both at work and at home.

  5

  Paradoxically, as the war went better, the draft situation got worse. Nor was it really paradoxical. The longer the war endured, the more it seemed unfair that some young men should do the fighting and others (like myself) should sit in comfort at home. Furthermore, as victory seemed more certain, experience in fighting men seemed less crucial. There was less risk in relieving men who had borne the heat and the burden of the fight and replacing them with neophytes.

  The papers therefore began to be full of all sorts of stories about the ending of war-work deferments for men under twenty-six. Since I was only twenty-four, I began to expect that I would be drafted sometime in the spring of 1944. I didn't enjoy the prospect.

  On March 25, the Navy Yard made the general announcement that they would be forced to abandon those males under twenty-six to the draft, and that meant my 2B status was over. On March 27, 1944, I received the official word. I got a new draft card, with the fatal expression 1A upon it. It was the first time I had seen this since I had registered three years before.

  I at once began considering the options open to me. Being an officer was better than being a private, at least as long as a shooting war was in progress, so I went down to the Naval Procurement Office to see about applying for officers' training.

  They wasted little time with me. An officer behind a desk ordered me to take off my glasses. He then said, "Read the chart on the wall there."

  I said, with my usual chuckleheaded honesty, "What chart?" even though I was clearly staring in the right direction.

  I was out on the street within five minutes.

  There was nothing to do but wait. The other under-twenty-sixers in the lab all got iAs also, and one by one we were called up for physical examinations. My call came at last on April 8, just as I was getting ready to go to New York with Gertrude. I was to report for a physical (in New York, where I was registered) on April 15.

  We stayed in New York through Monday and Tuesday (things were very different from that first uptight year at the Navy Yard and it was by now easy to get a day or two of leave now and then). I seized the opportunity to do as I used to do. I visited Campbell on April 10, to submit "The Wedge" in person and to have the usual long talk.

  When we got back to Philadelphia I asked the Draft Board there to have my physical transferred to Philadelphia, since I lived in that

  city even though I was registered in New York. It was a reasonable request and was granted at once—but it meant a month's delay and I certainly didn't object to that

  On May 5, I received my second notification of a physical, this time from the Philadelphia Draft Board. I was to report on May 18.

  On that day I had my physical—which lasted from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., a full workday. There were eleven different tests, including a "psychiatric test," concerning which I remember nothing at all. Nothing was particularly wrong with me except for my nearsightedness, which was bad enough to get me into 1AL— that is, 1A Limited. This removed me from immediate danger of being drafted, and I felt much better.

  In fact, it made it possible for us to continue planning our vacation. We were going to return to Hilltop Lodge, in June this time, and we planned to take Stanley with us.

  Then, on June 2, as though to compound our relief, a new draft card came with the unexpected classification of 2BL, which was even better than 2B, and set us into ecstasies.

  More excitement came on June 6, 1944, when a vast British-American-Canadian armada unloaded an army onto the Normandy beaches. The radio went into such a yammer of excitement over it that work was impossible that day.

  The next day, by coincidence, Heinlein, de Camp, and I were interviewed by the Navy Yard news periodical Air Scoop. A picture was eventually taken on June 27 to accompany the article. I still own a copy of that picture, and all three of us look unbelievably young and handsome, at least by later standards. It appeared in Air Scoop, along with the interview, on August 9.

  On June 17, 1944, we left for Hilltop Lodge with high hopes, but, alas, everything went wrong. The year before it had been an unexpected success; this time it was an unexpected fiasco.

  What happened was that it rained—and rained—steadily for four days. There were few vacationers present and, among them, none of v
alue. Poor Stanley, who was with us, and, as always, good as gold, tried to be cheerful and suggested card games. We did play—but it wasn't enough. On Wednesday we gave up and went home, losing a sizable bit of our money, which was not refunded, of course.

  Anyone who goes to a resort for a limited period of time always takes the chance of experiencing unsuitable weather, but among all the

  vacations I have ever taken, none was as completely unsatisfying as that one was.

  7

  On July 18, I received a copy of the August 1944 Astounding, with 'The Big and the Little" 1 in it. The story had received the cover. On the cover, in fact, it said, " 'The Big and the Little,' a Foundation Story by Isaac Asimov." The fact that a new Foundation story, identified as such, was included in the magazine had obviously become a selling point.

  It was a pleasant break in a horrible July in which we had just lived through eight straight days of over-ninety temperatures with the air conditioning broken down in the laboratory. 2

  On July 25, I called home to wish Stanley a happy fifteenth birthday, and I was greeted with the news that my parents had bought a house. I couldn't believe this evidence of unexampled prosperity. It was at 192 Windsor Place, just across Tenth Avenue from the candy store and a hundred yards south.

  My parents planned to live downstairs and rent out the upstairs. It would mean that they would no longer be across the street from the store and would no longer be able to look out to see if "everything was all right/'

  It was very difficult for me to get used to the thought of my parents as property owners.

  The next day, Gertrude and I celebrated our second anniversary. I arranged to get off from work at twelve, even though it was a Wednesday, and raced madly around getting two roses, a card, a bottle of wine, a box of candy, and a jigsaw puzzle, and then rushed home.

  It was a surprise, for I hadn't told Gertrude I was planning this. It was lucky, too, that I did not arrive five minutes later, for she was just on the point of leaving for the movies. Eventually, after sampling things I had bought and solving the puzzle, we went to the movies together. 3 It was a poor picture but a good day.

  In the outside world, an assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20 had failed, but Allied forces were steadily expanding their holdings in

  1 See Foundation, where it appears as "Part V—The Merchant Princes."

  2 The summers of 1943 an d *944> wmcn we spent in an apartment with one-way ventilation, were real stinkers. There were thirty-eight days over ninety in 1943, which set a record for Philadelphia, and thirty-four such days in 1944.

  3 We went to the movies a great deal in those days and probably saw every picture made—good, bad, and so-so. So did everyone else, of course, since these were the

  days before television.

  Normandy, and the Soviets had retaken virtually all the land they had lost to the Germans in two years and were coming within striking distance of Germany itself. In the Pacific, the United States was island-hopping toward Japan and was fighting on the island of Guam.

  Gertrude took two weeks off in the last half of August, planning to spend them with her family. I didn't like having to endure her absence, but it was only reasonable. The heat of this second impossible summer in a row, and the vast disappointment of the vacation had certainly earned her a relief. She left on August 14, 1944, and I followed on Saturday, the nineteenth, to share with her a three-day weekend.

  In the course of that weekend, I visited the old apartment across the street from the candy store for the last time. It was there that I had lived for the 5V2 years before I went to Philadelphia and it was there I had done all my early writing. 4

  Then, on August 21, I visited Campbell and handed in "Dead Hand," the fifth Foundation story, for which the record check arrived on the twenty-sixth. Meanwhile, the fourth Foundation story, "The Wedge," 5 appeared in the October 1944 Astounding.

  To tell the truth, though, I was tiring of the Foundation series. I had written three Foundation stories in a row and for nine months those three stories had been constantly on my mind. I wanted a rest and I also wanted a chance to make use of the other writing I was doing—the Navy style—which, unless I exorcised it somehow, might well corrode my vitals.

  When I handed in "Dead Hand," I suggested to Campbell that I do a short story I planned to call "Blind Alley," in which I made use of my Navy Yard experience. The story was to involve red tape, and part of it was to be told in the form of letters between bureaucrats in the Navy style, with the thesis being that it protected against stupidity but could not protect against ingenuity—if there was enough of that.

  Campbell laughed and agreed, and on September 2, I began it.

  It was set in the Foundation universe, at the height of the Galactic Empire, before the fall of that Empire arid the beginning of the Foundation. I did that because it was easier to do so than to make up a completely new background.

  It was the one story written in the Foundation universe (whether

  4 By September 1, the family moved to the new house—in time for my mother's forty-ninth birthday on the fifth.

  5 See Foundation, where it appears as "Part IV—The Traders."

  part of the Foundation series or not) in which there were extraterrestrial intelligences. In all the other stories, a purely human Galaxy is described, with no other intelligent beings present and with no unusual or monstrous animals either.

  The device of an all-human Galaxy had apparently never been used before. Stories of interstellar travel prior to the Foundation, notably those of E. E. Smith and by Campbell himself, had always presupposed numerous intelligences and had used these intelligences as devices wherewith to drive the plot.

  The multi-intelligence Galaxy is, to my way of thinking, more probable than the all-human one. However, I was concentrating on political and social forces in the Foundation series and I would have complicated these unbearably if I had introduced other intelligences. Even more important, it was my fixed intention not to allow Campbell to foist upon me his notions of the superiority and inferiority of races, and the surest way of doing that was to have an all-human Galaxy.

  In ''Blind Alley" the plot, as it worked itself out in my head, was to have a clever bureaucrat use Navy style to help save an extraterrestrial intelligence that would otherwise be destroyed. I knew that Campbell would interpret this as a superior humanity helping an inferior race and he would have no objection to it, and as long as he didn't interfere to introduce a heavy-handed indication of this interpretation, I would be satisfied. I mailed the story to him on October 10, and a check for $148.75 was in my hands on October 20.

  9

  We were planning to go to Atlantic City on the weekend of September 9 and 10. So far all our vacations had been in New York City, or in some resort we would have gone to if we had lived in New York. There was nothing to indicate that we were now Philadelphians and had been Philadelphians for more than two years. Why not Atlantic City, then? It was only fifty miles away and the train could take us there and back without undue expense, leaving us a whole day and a night to enjoy ourselves there.

  The only trouble was that as the weekend approached I found myself suffering from intestinal flu. Though I volunteered to go anyway rather than spoil our plans, Gertrude would have none of it.

  "We can go next weekend," she said firmly. "The Atlantic City boardwalk will not blow away."

  Those were her exact words. On Thursday the fourteenth, a hurricane hit the East Coast of the United States, and large sections of the

  Atlantic City boardwalk blew away—so we did not get to go to Atlantic City the next weekend, either. In fact, we never got to go there together.

  10

  The presidential campaign of 1944 was on. Roosevelt was running once again, for a fourth time. This made me very happy, for it meant I would have a chance to vote for him directly, instead of by way of Milton Silverman's absentee ballot.

  Vice President Henry A. Wallace had not been renominated,
however, and that distressed me. Senator Harry S Truman was running for Vice President instead, and I considered him a very mediocre person and could listen only glumly when one of the Navy Yard employees (a Republican) said, "Can you imagine Truman as President if anything happens to Roosevelt?"

  I couldn't.

  Running against Roosevelt was Thomas E. Dewey of New York, a slick campaigner, and Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio. I had approved of Dewey when he was a district attorney in New York, but he was a Republican so I wouldn't dream of supporting him for state office, let alone for national office. As for Bricker, he was utterly beyond the pale, for he was an isolationist and an extreme conservative.

  Nevertheless, I knew that Roosevelt, running for a fourth term, would have trouble with increasing numbers of those who felt he had been President long enough. It also seemed to me that Dewey was running a clever and effective campaign. The Philadelphia papers were strongly anti-Roosevelt and I got more and more depressed about it.

  On September 23, 1944, I was back in New York and visited my parents' new apartment at 192 Windsor Place for the first time. It was not the "little palace" my mother had proudly proclaimed it to be but it was certainly the nicest place they had lived in yet. 6

  On that evening, while I was sitting in the new apartment, Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters Union, making his first speech of the campaign, and he was in top form. His good-natured wit was excoriating and when he protested against slanders aimed at "my little dog, Fala," I knew he was in no trouble. I said in my diary that day, "It was a lulu and a knockout. 'My little dog, Fala'»will win the election for him."

  6 Another sign of the changing times was that my father was reluctantly giving up newspaper deliveries. It was impossible to get a paperboy, and he wasn't going to stick Stanley with it. Ten years earlier, he wouldn't have hesitated to stick me with it, but it was different now.